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Florida Field Naturalist 36(3):65-69, 2008.

IN MEMORIAM

William B. Robertson, Jr., 1924-2000

Florida ornithology will ever be in debt to Dr. William B. (Bill) Rob-ertson, Jr., who passed away on 28 January 2000 at the age of 75. Inmany ways and for many decades, he was the acknowledged Dean ofFlorida ornithologists. In a state that harbored some of the most scien-tifically and professionally prominent ornithologists of the second halfof the twentieth century (Austin, Brodkorb, Owre, Kale, James,Stevenson, Woolfenden, to name a selection), it was he whose engage-ment, collaboration, encouragement, advice, knowledge and wisdomwere sought out by all of the rest. And it was he who inevitably wascalled into service to advise their students who in turn became an ex-ceptional cadre of Florida-reared ornithologists. His was a wisdom andauthority born of his innate intelligence, long experience, care,thoughtfulness, and impeccable judgment. And he knew his Floridabirds. It was he whose care and scholarship produced the definitive ac-curate listing of the birds of Florida.

Bill Robertson’s Florida experience began with his doctoral studies,when he was sent to the Everglades by the great name in animal ecology,S. Charles Kendeigh, who was then dispatching his graduate studentsinto the major biomes. Bill’s youthful assignment was to study the avi-fauna of the West Indian zone of South Florida, which he did with a com-pleteness that produced a monumental 1955 doctoral thesis of 613information-crammed pages, entitled, “Breeding bird populations oftropical Florida in relation to the vegetation.” The paper remains the de-finitive statement of the avian biogeography and habitat relationships ofSouth Florida. Like much of his work, to great misfortune, the disserta-tion was never published and so was not as accessible to the wider scien-tific community as otherwise it should have been. Fortunately anopportunity to abstract the core of the work was made available yearslater and published as “The southern Florida avifauna” in the book “En-vironments of South Florida: Present and Past.” The senior author wasfortunate to be taken on as a coauthor charged with updating the infor-mation for the paper, an example of Bill’s habit of taking junior biologistsonto his projects, a trait that benefited many a newbie ornithologist.

As he was working on his dissertation, he also was working forEverglades National Park, where he became the second biologist of thestill new and still little-known park. It was from his assignments inthis capacity that in 1953 he wrote one of the most important studiesever of South Florida ecology, a report to the National Park Service en-

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titled “A survey of the effects of fire in Everglades National Park.” Inthis paper he demonstrated that much of South Florida’s vegetation isthe way it is because of fire, and that managed fire would have to be re-stored if the ecosystem were to persist. To the government, dominatedby its Smokey the Bear philosophy, starting its own forest fires was anew and scary thing, and this report helped create the era of controlledburning in the Federal government that turned back a century of igno-rant natural resources management practices. That today any pine-wood at all is left for southern Florida’s birds is due to Bill’s criticalstudy. As was the case with the dissertation, the 169-page report wasnever published, but that did not keep it from being exceptionally in-fluential within government natural resources management circles.

Toward the end of his first decade in Florida, he wrote what be-came one of the jewels of Florida natural history literature. Unlike theantecedent works, it was short, pithy, and popularized. This was “Ever-glades: The Park Story.” In this 1959 booklet, he not only shared his al-ready profound knowledge of what the Everglades is all about butshowed a flare for popular writing that could leave professional writers

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in his dust. His imagery, word choice, and turn of phrase made everypage a joy and every reader a new devotee of the Everglades. No popu-lar book reveals the Everglades nearly so well. Nearly fifty years laterthis booklet remains in print, a testament to the timeless nature of hiswriting, and it remains a must-read for every South Florida naturalist.

As the sixties progressed, he was joined by a much larger scienceand resource management staff in Everglades National Park, popu-lated by a succession of young scientists to whom he became a cher-ished mentor. He also was burdened increasingly by unendingdemands for meetings, letter answering, reports, opinion pieces, andother products that can consume a conscientious government scientist,particularly one who took on every assignment in a perfectionist mode.The sixties and the seventies brought more intense environmentalchallenges, heating up the biopolitics of the Everglades. As saving theremnant pieces of South Florida became a national issue and later anational priority, the agendas of involved government agencies andconservation groups swayed with the wind; and it was he that stood up-right in the resulting breezes. He was involved deeply, although quietly,in all the issues of the era—the Jetport and Big Cypress Preserve, Is-landia and Biscayne National Monument, Aerojet, SeaDade, TurkeyPoint, and in Everglades National Park itself the never-ending battlesover water management, fire management, endangered species protec-tion and so on. He was not the guy standing up at public hearings for allto see and applaud; he was the one whose insights were being put forthby those who did speak. As the decades sped by, his views continued tobe sought, even if not always followed. But he kept on keeping on, doingthe best he could in the highly charged political climate, being univer-sally admired by the environmental community, and sometimes frus-trating his bosses. Importantly, through all these job-relateddistractions, he never let go of the core of his life’s work, the ornithologyof South Florida. He did his studies and inspired others to do theirs.

Bill’s South Florida bird studies are too numerous to list, but include:waterbird censuses; Bald Eagles in Florida Bay during their period ofrange-wide decline and recovery; Ospreys; Great White Herons; RoseateSpoonbills; Christmas Counts; breeding bird surveys; Audubon FieldNotes Regional Reports and Changing Seasons summaries, which them-selves are classics; rarities, new records, and range changes; and reportsof the effects of climatic events on birds, especially hurricane Donna.

But of all his bird studies, there was one true love—the terns breed-ing on the Dry Tortugas. This island love affair began during a honey-moon visit with his new bride Betty in 1956. His 1964 paper “The ternsof the Dry Tortugas,” published as a Bulletin of the Florida State Mu-seum, is a classic of history, geography, and ornithology. Annually he or-ganized his Tortugas Trip, and for his teams of volunteers and students

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it was an experience of a lifetime. A few lucky ones came to plan theiryear around the repeating opportunity to be on the Tortugas (despitethe seasick trip on the way there), catching birds, taking data, banding,and recovering from the exertions each night with good company andplentiful libation. First with his wife Betty and then with an increasingcadre of colleagues including his great co-conspirator Glen Woolfenden,he studied this colony for decades, come hell or high water. At times itwas hell to keep the project going; there are times he did it on his vaca-tion time because his bosses wanted him to stop. But unlike them, heknew that long-term research is so precious that the vicissitudes of themoment cannot be allowed to interfere. And he did it through the highwater of a hurricane, through which he was able to document storm ef-fects on the terns. Unraveling the demography of the Sooty Tern washis goal, but he also found out about site fidelity, nesting success, food,and migration. The latter led to what most scientists would consider acareer capper, when he published “Trans-Atlantic migration of juvenileSooty Terns” in the scientific world’s most prestigious journal, Nature,his finding that Tortugas Sooty Terns crossed the Atlantic.

Also important are the studies that never bore his name, those thathe encouraged from his young colleagues and students, studies of her-ons, ibises, hawks, sparrows, kites, osprey, seabirds, mockingbirds, vul-tures and many more that comprise the bulk of the literature on SouthFlorida birds of the era. It is hard to recall a South Florida bird studythat he did not in some way advise. He invited his young colleagues toanalyze his own data and write the papers, on which he might or mightnot be an author. As a scientist, his professional generosity, selfless-ness, and encouragement remain nothing short of remarkable in a fieldnot well known for such attributes among its practitioners. Young orni-thologists of Florida could have had access to no better a mentor.

His other great life’s work, the study of the South Florida avifaunaas a whole, saw a completion point when he and Glen Woolfenden com-pleted a pair of papers, “Florida bird species: an annotated list” and“The breeding birds of Florida Part. 1. Sources and post-settlementchanges.” Both published as special publications by the Florida Orni-thological Society, these works by the two great perfectionists of Flor-ida ornithology were the result of a long, deliberative, incisive, error-finding, creative thinking process that produced the definitive base-line studies of Florida’s changing avifauna.

In 1971, he was invited to participate in the Second National Bio-logical Congress of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, andhis talk, although modestly presented, was the most precise and cut-ting statement ever of the issues of the Everglades. Never published,the talk bravely entitled, “A quick look at natural history, biogeogra-phy, and biopolitics in South Florida” was well circulated in photocopy

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and became required reading for Everglades partisans. So well re-garded was Bill that he was the only possible choice as the inauguralpresident of the fledgling Florida Ornithological Society, holding the of-fice in 1973-1974. At the first conference ever of park service biologistsin 1976, then-Assistant Secretary of Interior Nathaniel P. Reed sur-prised him with the U.S. Department of Interior Medal for Distin-guished Service. He was a featured speaker at that meeting, before anauditorium full of his admiring Park Service colleagues and protégés.

His other recognitions were many. Joining the American Ornithol-ogists’ Union in 1955, he was elected Fellow in 1977 and was alsoelected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement ofScience. He received the Award for Excellence from the George M.Wright Society and the Herbert W. Kale II Award of the Florida Chap-ter of the Wildlife Society. He was selected as an Honorary Member ofthe Florida Ornithological Society. Posthumously, the Department ofthe Interior awarded Bill its highest honor, the Citation for MeritoriousService, and Everglades National Park named one if its research sta-tions the Dr. Bill Robertson, Jr. Center. The Florida Ornithological So-ciety honored his contributions by establishing the William B. andMary J. Robertson Fellowship Award to support the study and conser-vation of wildlife, habitat, and ecosystems in Florida and the Carib-bean. So far, the award has funded study of Brown-Headed Nuthatchesin the Bahamas and further study of the Sooty Terns of Dry Tortugas.

Bill Robertson, Jr., was born in Berlin, Illinois, on 22 August 1924.He received his AB degree from Carthage College in 1947 and his MS(1949) and doctorate (1955) from the University of Illinois, Urbana. Hisinterest in birds was early found; he published his first breeding birdcensus when he was 17 years old. In December of 1997, Dr. William B.Robertson, Jr., retired after an astounding 46 years of federal service.But even in retirement he continued to conduct field work, provideguidance and proceeding with his life’s work of Florida birds. And thatlife’s work continues today through the ongoing studies and conserva-tion work of many dozens of his students, former assistants, colleagues,and successors. He was a man of profound reserve, intellect, and delib-eration; a man of unbending ethics who was not swayed by the winds ofpolitics and never backed down from saying what he knew to be right;a man to whom his colleagues were his family. Every ornithologist andbirder who follows the path he blazed in the ornithology of South Flor-ida can only be grateful that he was who he was and that he did whathe did. For a long time coming, Florida ornithology will miss its Dr. Bill.

James A. Kushlan, P.O. Box 2008, Key Biscayne, Florida 33149 jkush-lan@earthlink.net and Oron L. Bass, Jr., Everglades National Park,40001 State Road 9336, Homestead, Florida 33134.